And that’s all that matters now.
Chapter Four
Marko climbs into the hole first, getting his footing as he looks up at Greg and Devon who are standing over my father, getting ready to slowly lower him into the ground with the help of Marko. It’s hard for me to look at the blanket wrapped around my father’s personage. It’s like looking at a bloody ghost, lying on the sandy hill next to Olivia’s grave. No one here knows him. No one here knew him, I guess is what I should say. They’re all being sensitive and kind to me, but I know that they’re all detached from the reality of this. My father was an amazing man, someone they could have all benefited from. I think his actions explain that better than anything else could. He literally crossed a post-apocalyptic wasteland to find us.
I wish I had that kind of strength. I wish I had the endurance to be that kind of a person, but I had fled with a bunch of friends to the coast. It wasn’t very heroic or noble. I had completely written him off, abandoned him to whatever fate came looking for him. What kind of a monster did that make me? I think it makes me a pretty bad one. I feel horrible about it. In fact, I can’t stop thinking about how I abandoned him. What it must have been like for him all those months, alone, worried sick about us. It must have torn him apart. Clearly, it compelled him to do something bold and drastic.
This was my doing. Like a lighthouse, I lured him here, only to have him killed upon the stormy rocks. Damn Henry and his eager trigger finger. I’m trying to understand him and be reasonable here, but I can’t. How can I be? I watch as Greg picks my father up by the shoulders and Devon wraps his arms around my father’s knees. They have no idea what they’re doing and, quite frankly, it’s embarrassing to watch. My father deserves more dignity than this. This is the kind treatment they’d given Olivia too when she died. No one knows what they’re doing, but we make do with what we have.
I watch them wrestle my father into the dirt, handing him to Marko and awkwardly laying him into the hole which is too short for my father to lie in serenely like I had envisioned. I tell myself it’s alright. Nothing about this is perfect or what I’d wanted. Why start poking holes in things now? It is what it is.
No one knows how to act with my father’s death. No one knows what to think or how to look with this one. All their emotions tell them that they just murdered some random guy who stumbled into our camp. They don’t feel bad for him necessarily, just for me and Lexi. They look at me and they see how stoic I am and how distraught Lexi is and they don’t have anything to say about it. Nor should they.
Lexi and I are the ones who get to grieve for my father and that’s all there is to it. As Marko finishes trying to lay him down respectfully, Greg and Noah start shoveling in the dirt and sand from the hill. Everyone watches silently, like stone angels in a cemetery. Lexi shivers and shakes as tears run down her cheeks to the rhythm of her sniffling. I don’t shed any tears. I just watch as the blue blanket-wrapped body disappears under each shovelful of dirt.
As he vanishes, I can hear Lexi making more and more noise. She’s not taking this well. She’s not holding up against all of it. I know that in a matter of seconds, she’s going to break and all the tears are going to come flooding out and I’m going to be the one who is going to have to console her. I don’t have a problem doing that, I just don’t want the others to see it.
“Why did you have to come back here?” Lexi says through her clenched teeth and I can feel all the gazes around my father’s grave shifting and focusing on her. I don’t want to be cruel, but I can’t help but feel that this is what she wants. I can’t help but think that she wants the attention right now. Why else would she be acting out?
The cold reality that I’m facing is that I’m not alone. The somber faces that ring my father’s grave are the faces of those who are now being confronted with a reality that they probably haven’t faced yet. This is the crushing, brutal realization that everything they know and love is gone. Everyone has been living in the fantasy that their family might be the only family that’s not destroyed, that hasn’t been completely displaced by the horrors of the Collapse and the riots. Everyone knows that there is no silver lining anymore, there is only chaos and death. Their friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, brothers, sisters, parents, or anyone else that isn’t here with us right now is gone. There’s nothing out there that might comfort any of us from that fact.
Truthfully, there’s only the brutal reality that we might be it. All that’s left. My father might have been the one random blessing that our group was given and now that it’s over, we’re all alone again. We haven’t seen or heard from anyone in so long that hope is all but gone. But the truly sad part about all of it is that we didn’t even see our hope die. It vanished in the ebb and flow of our day to day monotony. Now that it’s been pointed out though, it’s haunting.
“You were stupid to come here,” Lexi snarls at our father’s grave. Tears are burning down her flushed, crimson cheeks as she snarls at him with such rage and passion. “You should have waited until everything got better, until things settled. Why did you come now?”
I want to slap her. I want her to realize what it is she’s saying. I want her to see how absolutely ridiculous it is to hear what she’s saying. When exactly were things going to get better? How were they going to get better? Everyone here knows that death has taken everything that we once knew and loved and has turned it into ash and dust. All I have heard on the radio, all that I have seen from the balcony, and everything that I feel right now in my gut tells me that the world is gone, beyond the point where I can repair it. There’s nothing that we can do to fix it, nothing we can do to set things right. There was no place for our father to hide, to wait, and to just sit back and relax while the government or scientists made everything better. No, our father knew exactly what had happened and that if he wanted to see us again, he was going to have to risk it all.
Lexi is beginning to sob loudly enough that I gesture for everyone to step back and to give us a moment or two. They all nod at me or just slip away as I walk around my father’s fresh grave to where my sister is weeping. I wrap my arms around her and pull her close to me. I know that she’s suffering from this and I know that she feels horrible about how things have turned out, but it isn’t her fault that she doesn’t know how to properly respond. It isn’t her fault that he’s dead. That lies solely with Henry.
There’s nothing for her to say that I haven’t thought about already. Perhaps that’s why I’ve stayed silent. I don’t need to explain anything. I don’t need to understand what I already feel. All she has to do is dwell in that place where grief takes over everything and be comforted that I’m there with her, in the dark, holding her hand. I pay attention to everything around us. I notice that the others are starting to head back, that only Noah and Greg linger long after all the others have gone. There were no words spoken, no prayers given, no last rite. I don’t know what you do at these sorts of things, but Lexi’s bitter, vengeful words are all that my father will have to remember him by on this mortal plane. I think it’s sad, but I know that he wouldn’t mind. My father didn’t want a legacy left behind. He was a writer, not a pop star. He believed in us and that was enough for me to feel good about.
Deep down inside, I know that my father came here for a reason. I know that he tracked us down and spent every ounce of everything he had just to get to us. I think about everything that he had to have done to get here. He had to cross the entire country to find us. Even if he did it in that truck that he has, it would have taken days to get here. Then, he would have spent time in Gainesville at the university looking for our dorms. We both left messages for him to find and clearly he must have found one of them, maybe both of them. When we left Gainesville, things were getting out of hand. Maybe they had cooled down by now, but even so, he must have genuinely searched all over campus to find out where we were. Then he made the journey from Gainesville all the way to the beach house. What a terrible way to end such a long journey. I can only
dream of the struggles that he faced on his road to us. It must have been long and lonely out there. I bet it was terrifying.
Sometimes, I stand at the gate leading off of the property, down that long sandy road and I feel naked. I feel like I’m standing right in front of the eye of God and that he sees all of my sins written across me. It’s that sort of horrifying vulnerability that makes me want to stay here forever. But my father didn’t have that. He went out there into the world to find us, and there’s no one who can say that he didn’t do just that.
“Come on,” I whisper to Lexi after half an hour of kneeling at our father’s grave. “Let’s go inside.”
Lexi wipes her eyes and looks over to Noah who is lingering like a good boyfriend, better than she deserves probably. He extends a hand and Lexi pushes herself up without his help. Ever the petulant, independent woman. Noah follows after her like a lost puppy, dreaming of his master one day falling in love with him. I think he’s going to have a very long wait. I look at the mound on top of my father’s body and I feel a sickness inside of me. This is something that shouldn’t be. I feel like there’s an alternate world out there and somehow we all got stuck with the shitty version of how things go. Somewhere out there is a world where my father isn’t planted along the Florida coast. There’s a world where everything didn’t die on us.
As I push myself up, Greg quickly comes to my side and hugs me. I plant my head against his strong chest and stare off at the ocean, the great, swelling gray tide. It looks so sickly, poisoned. I can hear his heart beating and I know that I’m not the only one who is alive out here. I’m grateful for him. I need to have Greg here with me.
I pull back from him.
“You’re really composed,” he says to me. “I would be heartbroken if my mother showed up and Henry killed her.” Greg is the only child of a single mother, a chip that he constantly wears on his shoulder. They overcame so much, in his mind. I don’t want to remind him that my father was a single dad with two daughters.
“That’s just it,” I say to him. “I was heartbroken months ago. When I talked to him last and I hung up the phone, I cried the entire night. I knew that I’d never see him again. I knew that it was the last time I’d hear his voice.” I look Greg in the eyes and realize that he’s more emotional about this than I am. It makes me sad for him. “In my mind, my father died a long time ago. My heart will come to terms.”
Greg doesn’t understand what a relief it was to see Dad again, even with the horrible, crushing reality that he wasn’t going to survive this last encounter. Seeing him there, on the dining room table, had been one of the hardest things to see in my life, but it was a horror painted on the tapestry of peace. It was the fact that I was actually going to have closure. I am one of the few people that knows for a fact how and where my beloved parent died. Others would be tortured for the rest of their lives wondering where their parents had gone to or what had happened to them. There were horrible stories out there in the world about the things that had happened to people. At least I know that my father died a reasonably quick and painless death. I wouldn’t have that question on my mind for the rest of my life.
Making our way up the sandy, concrete steps, I see that Skye is lingering on the balcony, leaning on the railing and staring out into oblivion. I watch the strands of her blonde wisps of hair caught in the breeze as she stares off toward the ocean. Skye never took the Collapse very well. She’d been raised by her grandparents and when the Collapse finally came, she was left alone.
There was no way she was getting back to Nebraska since it was quarantined and her grandparents had told her that they refused to leave. They were going to stick it out. When the government shut off the electricity, she never got to hear from them again. She took it pretty hard. I don’t blame her. She mostly receded into herself, then, becoming the pretty silent face that would always watch, but never contribute to the scary discussions. She would nod and do as she was told. That was the great part of having her around. She was great to vent to, great to talk to. You could tell by her expressions what she was thinking, but that was all you ever got from her unless you talked to her one on one.
As we walk up the wooden planks of the steps, she reaches out and puts a soft hand on my shoulder. Pulling free from Greg, I wrap my arms around Skye and hug her, giving her a kiss on her soft, cold cheeks. I love her. She feels like another little sister. In fact, it feels like we’ve all grown so close over the months of our isolation.
Skye pulls back from me after a moment with tears in her eyes. She blinks several times, wiping away her tears, brushing off her moment of weakness, and points to the house. As I follow her finger, I know that I’m not going to like what I’m going to see. I nod to Skye and walk across the balcony. I don’t know whose idea it was to get sandbags and line the balcony with them, probably Tony’s, but the place looks like a bunker from some old British war film. Everything looks gray even, so it would have to be one of those old black and white movies. I shake my head. Everything seems so surreal these days.
Opening the glass door, I feel suddenly afraid. I feel like the beach house is so vulnerable and naked. My father’s body was so brutally damaged, so beaten and scarred over the length of his journey. I know fresh wounds when I see them and all of those wounds were still healing. What could he possibly have been through and who would have done that? Did he kill them? Were they still out there? If they were, then this house seems very naked with all the glass walls, even if they are thick enough to survive hurricane winds and debris flying around.
Inside the house, Devon, Marko, and Katrina are standing silently, looking into the living room where I can see that Lexi has wasted no time in terrifying everyone. I shake my head as I approach the room. She has her back to me, but that’s what I focus on first. She’s wearing a backpack and God knows how she got a bag packed so quickly or what she even put in there. I know that Lexi has the same memories that I have, the same events and training that our father gave us. He taught us what was valuable in the wilderness and what was worthless. We both know how to survive on our own if we need to, granted there was a lot more green out there in the world when he was teaching us all of this. There aren’t rabbits and fish out there to hunt and survive off of anymore.
But strapped beside the pack on her back is a rifle and I instantly feel a cold, nervous feeling in the sinking of my gut. What is she doing with it? Why does she need a gun? I know that Lexi is emotional right now, but a gun is the last thing that I think she needs. She needs a stiff drink and a night alone in bed. She’s bent over our father’s bag, rummaging, and I feel a cold anger roiling inside of me.
Chapter Five
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I shout at her, stepping past Marko and Katrina who are standing in the doorway, holding hands. They look at me as Lexi keeps rummaging through our father’s stuff. I feel angry. I feel furious at what I’m seeing. It’s like I’m looking at a grave robber stealing the clothes off of my father’s back. What right does Lexi have to go through this stuff without me? She doesn’t have a clue what she’s doing and I won’t let this emotional little brat break and destroy the last remaining tokens of our father that we have. I won’t stand for it. “I said: what the hell do you think you’re doing, Lexi?” I snap at her.
She slowly rests the bag on the coffee table that it was leaning on before we went out to say farewell to our father. Slowly she turns around and looks at me with pure venom in her eyes. I swear, if my sister could shoot lasers out of her eyes, I’d be a puddle of bloody goo right now. I look at her and I hold her gaze, refusing to relent. I’m not afraid to put her in her place. The way she’s behaving is childish and immature.
“What do you care?” Lexi growls at me.
“I care because you’ve got a gun and a stupid idea in your head,” I answer quickly, refusing to give her an inch. “Lexi, put the gun down.”
“I’m not aiming it at anyone, Val.” Lexi looks back at our father’s pack. “Chil
l out and stop being such a bitch.”
Bitch? Did she really just say that to me? I want to grab her by the hair and throw her to the ground. I’ve put up with a lot from Lexi over the years, but I will not let her just stand there and insult me. She clearly has no idea who she is talking to. I am not some punk freshman or some jerk on the street who flipped her off. I’m her sister and I’m not going to take it.
“What did you just say to me?” I step forward, putting Marko and Katrina behind me.
I see Noah on the far side of the room with Henry lurking in the doorway, cloaked in the shadows of the windowless area of the loft. He’s like a coyote lingering after being caught. I can’t stand the sight of him. Why doesn’t he just go away? I don’t care where he goes, downstairs or outside. Just give us all a moment away from him. He’s not the one who needs to make things right. He just needs to be at a distance before we can accept him again. I don’t doubt that in no time, we’ll tolerate him again, but this is all too soon.
“I told you to chill out,” Lexi says with her back still to me.
“No, you called me a bitch,” I snap at her, reminding her of her offense.
“I call them like I see them,” Lexi scorns.
“Put the gun down,” I order her again. I’m not going to give in on this matter. “Put it down right now, Lexi.”
“Or what?” Lexi snaps at me.
“Or I put you on the ground,” I tell her.
She doesn’t know what I’m capable of. She always thinks that I’m the weaker of the two of us, that I’m the soft one. Everyone thinks that, so she’s not alone in that thought. But I know how to take care of myself. I know how to deal with people and I don’t have a single doubt that I can take that gun away from her and throw her on her ass before she knows what’s happening. I once put Greg on his ass when he was drunk one night and that was the last time he ever tried to get handsy with me when he’d been drinking.
LEFT ALIVE (Zombie series Box Set): Books 1-6 of the Post-apocalyptic zombie action and adventure series Page 52